China of My Mind

When I tell people that I have recently published a novel set in China, one of the first questions they ask is whether I’ve been there. My response seems to be a letdown. The expectant look on their faces shifts as they wonder why I chose to write about a place I’ve never visited. Sometimes I sense incredulity. What makes me think I can write about China?

My grandfather, Watts O. Pye, was one of the early missionaries to return to China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In Shanxi Province, he oversaw the building of a hospital, schools, a library and roads that brought famine relief. The Reverend Pye died young, but my father, Lucian W. Pye, remained in Shanxi with my grandmother, living in the mission compound under Japanese occupation. He finally left China for college, returned with the Marines at the end of World War II, and went on to become a renowned Sinologist and the author of over 20 books on Asia, and China in particular.

My grandfather and father’s accomplishments, though, don’t make me an expert by inheritance. And yet, I’ve always a felt strong tie to China. I grew up in a house crowded with Chinese paintings, ceramics and furniture. My best childhood friend and I invented rituals with a tiny white Ming cup that we thought possessed special powers. I spent countless hours lying on a deep blue Oriental carpet covered with cherry blossoms, staring up into a painted scroll along whose ribbons of clouds I imagined traveling into the distant, shrouded mountains.
When the time came for my parents to move to a retirement home, I sat on that same rug and went through boxes of onionskin pages with faded blue type on which my grandfather had recorded his impressions of the eerie beauty of Shanxi. His journals captured my imagination in the same way the Chinese objects had when I was a girl, but now there was the specificity and poetry of a Victorian-era gentleman’s language to further embellish my sense of that distant land. Although I had always felt pride about my grandfather’s humanitarian work in China, I was ashamed of his religious zealotry and colonial perspective. Now, the arabesques of his prose conveyed his love of those rugged plains and rolling foothills covered with loess, a yellow dust that blew in from the Gobi Desert, as well as his respect for the Chinese people — thus deepening my grasp of his contradictory position there.

But impressions from childhood confirmed years later as an adult still don’t make me an expert. My father, on the other hand, was a recognized one. His colleagues at M.I.T. and at the John K. Fairbank Center at Harvard were called “China watchers.” For decades, in fact, that’s all they could do since China was closed to American visitors.

When he did finally visit in 1972, he brought back trinkets and clothing — cheap red and gold Mao buttons, quilted jackets in workman’s blue, olive green caps and the most ubiquitous souvenir of the time, Mao’s Little Red Book. My father spread his loot in our living room amid the Chinese antiques, stark reminders of Communism’s rejection of the delicate, evocative artistry of the past. I sensed from him that these strange new items now served as reminders that China, while suddenly open to Westerners, remained beyond the grasp of our understanding. Being permitted finally to see it firsthand had not brought outsiders closer to true understanding.

My first writing mentor, Annie Dillard, once told our college class that if you ever have the choice between visiting a far-flung place or reading a book about it, choose the book. She had just returned from a trip to Alaska and said that the only thing she hadn’t known about already from her reading was the sunflowers. Apparently, in midsummer, as they work to follow the sun circling tightly overhead, their stalks twist until their bright, oversize heads break right off their slender necks. She offered a quirky, maniacal smile and said that a book containing that tidbit would be worth reading.

This is how I feel about the China in my mind. My favorite books have always been those of far-off lands. The Middle East shimmered in Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” and while I didn’t necessarily understand Egypt any more precisely after reading all four volumes, that exotic landscape imprinted itself upon my teenage mind. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Maugham’s “Painted Veil” and Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River,” each revealed colonialism’s inherent flaws through the trials of unforgettable characters. These books gave me a first glimpse that there were countries resistant to Western understanding and that any presumption otherwise was an act of supreme hubris inevitably ending in the white man’s deserved downfall.

The exoticism of those novels that I was taken in by turned out to reveal a complexity of culture that doesn’t easily yield to an outsider’s — and perhaps especially not to a Westerner’s — worldview. I believe those books helped me understand my family’s complicity in a corrupt and confusing past. The layers of meaning about oppression and injustice brought on by colonialist racism were like the dust that covered everything in my grandfather’s descriptions of Shanxi — layered, dense and impossible to sweep away.

My father once said to me, only half in jest, that “political scientists are all failed novelists.” I suspect he meant that academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture. His deference to art was a kind gesture toward me, a young writer aspiring to create it, but also an acknowledgment that art provides the transformative vision that turns a place on a map into a deeply felt world. It offers the reader hope of redemption and a new path — a way out through human understanding.

Aleksandar Hemon says that “expertise is the enemy of imagination,” and I can’t help but add that imagination, in the end, is our most profound and surprising teacher. It reveals truths we couldn’t otherwise believe.

What I know of China I have inherited from my family who lived there, and also from a white Ming cup, cherry blossom rug and a Little Red Book. These talismans have spoken volumes to me over the years. They helped create a land that inhabited, and even haunted, my imagination. The China of my novel is a dusty, rugged and exotic place that is not exactly on any map. Travelers, scholars and the Chinese themselves must explain the real China. I have tried to create an altogether different country that I hope will provide another landscape for the truth.

Virginia Pye is the author of the novel “River of Dust.” She plans to go to China in 2014 for the Shanghai Book Festival and perhaps to visit her father’s hometown and her grandfather’s grave.

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